By Bill Caswell

Almost everyone who has found themselves unemployed has experienced the terrible delays of finding and getting a new job.  After dozens, if not hundreds, of job applications the candidate remains without any signs of interest by companies.  Yet, these individuals know they have desirable skills and work habits.  Most frustrating is the experience of applying for a job at which the person is totally qualified, yet not a peep – not a job, not an interview, not a short list indication, in fact, not even an acknowledgement of having applied.  At this point, the individual starts to look inward: “What’s wrong with me?  Am I too old?  Am I disadvantaged being an immigrant to this country?  Am I just unlucky?”  The answer is that there is nothing wrong with you.  It is a lack of understanding of the job-search dynamics that creates the difficulty.  This paper describes three with a focus on one, the gatekeepers.

What is Normal?

What is normal is not having a job.  What is abnormal is having a job, even for professionals, despite conventional thinking to the contrary.  While most professionals are accustomed to being employed, little do they recognize their good fortune in having a job, especially one that is personally fulfilling.  They only realize this when they become unemployed for a while.

Because people think having a job is normal, they get down on themselves for being unemployed.

Instead, a professional career coach will try to change people’s thinking to a more positive bent.  “Being unemployed has nothing to do with any weakness I have, but rather with my trying to align my situation with job opportunities.  Therefore I have a lot of work to do to find and connect that complex alignment.”

Problem One: Where you look

When you buy a 649 lottery ticket you do so, not expecting to win, but nonetheless hoping that you do cash in.  You can clearly see the goal of $1 million dollars and you know that your ticket has as much chance as anyone else’s.  Yet, you also know that your odds at 100,000 to one or higher leave you with little chance. Nevertheless you are assured that somebody has to win.

When you apply for an advertised job, you are engaging in a lottery.  You can see the prize, you want it, you know that someone has to win it, and you know that you are as good a candidate for the position as anyone else (by analogy, your $2 is as good as anyone else’s).

The first problem is that this is a lottery.  There may be a dozen applicants.  So aside from any other consideration if you are among a dozen applicants your odds are 1 in 12.  Those are terrible odds.  You would walk away from a poker game if you were confronted with such odds.

Solution:  Avoid spending most of your time searching the public job domain.  Instead, learn to focus on the unpublished job domain where (a) 60% to 80% of the jobs lie and (b) competition is reduced by a factor of 100 times.

Problem Two: Getting Past the Gatekeepers

Assuming that you do qualify perfectly for an advertised position, and because you will not be the only applicant, someone will take a cursory look at all the applicants before passing them onto the hiring manager.  We call these people gatekeepers.  Gatekeepers present you with a whole host of difficulties:

  • They’re in a hurry
  • They may be lazy
  • They may not know the technicalities
  • Dynamics shifts from selection to rejection
  • They introduce their own prejudices
  • They may be covering up a job fix

Let’s discuss each separately.

Gatekeepers in a Hurry

By the time the manager has formalized a job description, passed it to the Human Resources department (HR), got it published in the newspaper or online, the manager requiring the person is frantic.  Probably this position has remained unfilled for 3 or 4 weeks.  The manager has impossible production deadlines to meet and is trying to do so short-staffed.  Other employees are complaining of being overworked and customers are complaining too.  It seems to the manager that HR is taking forever to get the job posted.

And HR is not amused.  They feel unappreciated by having to work against impossible deadlines.  So, they accelerate the process, quickly dismissing anyone not perfectly qualified or perhaps accepting and interviewing the first few ‘qualified’ applicants that comes in the door.

Laziness

While no one is saying that gatekeepers are lazy, there is a human truism that applies.  The gatekeeper is a tenant in this selection job, not the owner.  Owners take pride and care.  In this case the manager for whom the person would work is the ‘owner’ whereas the gatekeeper is usually a less interested ‘tenant’.

Gatekeepers who don’t understand the Job

If a job is begging for a particle physicist with accelerator experience which includes the statistical manipulation of large data sets, it is highly unlikely that a gatekeeper would understand enough subtle aspects of the job to filter out who qualifies and who does not.  Thus good people who might fit the job could be rejected.

Dynamics of Rejection by Gatekeepers

If the manager, Fred, expects 4 or 5 applicants to his Purchasing Manager’s job and instead is inundated with 95 candidates, what is he to do?  “I don’t have time to look at 95 applications: I can’t even meet my present shipping deadlines!”  So he passes the culling process to someone else.  It could be an HR department, an administrative assistant, or a more junior manager. As stated before, it is highly unlikely that this gatekeeper would understand enough subtle aspects of the job to filter or screen out who qualifies and who does not.  More important the culling process shifts from the dynamics of acceptance to the dynamics of rejection.

In the dynamics of selection, one examines the resumes to determine who is the most skilled.

However, in the dynamics of rejection, one examines the resumes to find reasons to get rid of the resume from an already-too-large stack.  The focus is on minor and unimportant characteristics instead of on the relevant and key skill sets.  Rejection might come about because the person is not bilingual (assuming it is a desirable, but not mandatory requirement), lives too far away from the office, does not use the word “purchasing” anywhere in the resume, etc., etc.  The point is that most applicants are being evaluated against less important characteristics rather than important characteristics.

Prejudices of Gatekeepers

Given the responsibility to reject applicants and to eliminate them as quickly as possible, it is easy for the gatekeepers to consciously or subconsciously inject personal prejudices into the rejection process.  After all, their job is to find reasons to reject as many as possible as quickly as possible.

The Job-Fix by Gatekeepers

The most pernicious possibility is when a gatekeeper is given the responsibility to go through the hiring process to satisfy internal bureaucracy when the successful candidate has already been decided by the department.  This injustice creates not only work for the gatekeeper but also work and emotional investment by the applicants – all to satisfy a dysfunctional entity that creates one set of rules and operates by another.

Problem Three: Not Giving a Compelling Story

Last of the three reasons, of this paper, why one cannot find work lies in the resume itself.  This will be the subject of another paper.  Nevertheless, in point form, a resume should:

  • Tell a compelling life story
  • Grab the reader’s immediate attention
  • Avoid any exaggerations or ambiguities
  • Allow an easy fit between the job need and applicant’s skills
  • Allow for a positive rejection (a bad job fit serves no one’s interests)
  • Reflect not only the skills of the individual but also make the personality of the applicant shine
  • Be easy to adjust to the specific job description

If that is done, hiring managers will be salivating when reading the resume.  When the manager invites this person in for an interview it is because the manager has already decided that “this is the type of person we want.”  The interview will usually serve as a confirmation.

Summary

First, the focus on the right job market – the unpublished one – not only increases your odds, but also such pursuits often results in your being the only applicant for the job.

Second, the unpublished job market avoids all the difficulties of gatekeepers listed above.

Third, a well-conceived resume that digs under the surface to identify who you really are and then conveys that to the reader speeds up the hiring process for all.

Good luck and good hunting.

Bill Caswell is principal consultant at Career Coaching International. You can connect with Bill at www.ccinternational.ca.